


Days Like This

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Series: Lived, Loved, Lost [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Caretaker Will, Fluff, Forgetting Life Together, Forgetting Loved Ones, Hannibal Loves Will, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Murder Family, Murder Husbands, Old Age, Old Married Couple, Reading Aloud, Sad, Will Loves Hannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 11:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13569309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: Will Graham lives for days like this, when blank stares and unknowing eyes show some blip of recognition of a life lived so fully together. When he can tell the stories and press their wrinkled hands together in a moment when everything feels the same as it always did.





	Days Like This

**Author's Note:**

> So this is sad as fuck, I'm sorry in advance. It was actually very therapeutic to write this as one of my grandparents is diagnosed with Alzheimers. (definitely the only similarity to Hannibal though) 
> 
> I was inspired by a fan art I saw on tumblr, when I speak to the artist, I'll post a link if they're okay with it. 
> 
> Find me on tumblr at obitine5eva. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Please R and R, let me know what you think!

There were days that were as good as silence. The house, this house, that they had stayed in for more than a decade resonated only with the sound of creaking floorboards. The creak of a basement door that was oft unused and whose squeaky hinge needed greased. A hot water maker that flushed out the base for hot tea so many times on those days that the sink filled with slightly chipped mugs and saucers that he would put off until he needed another. But there were no voices on quiet days except his own. In the mornings, when he would wake pressed to a body that would startle awake beside him, eyes unknowing and afraid until the moment passed and they were simply blank.

Those days, when no words passed by curved lips now cracked with age, he couldn’t bring himself to read the books that those ears had loved for so long. He had tried, many times, but on those quiet days there was no reaction to his words anymore. Only a blank stare that would fixate on the wall in front of the red velvet armchair, set close enough to the fire that it stayed warm in spite of itself.

On those days, he stopped talking by noon and instead resigned himself to his fate of letting out the dog whose hair was as gray as his own and whose bones were far more brittle. Gone were the days of bone chasing across the lawn, where the only road that led there was paved with the red dirt he could no longer put in the grind to remove from trouser legs and shoe bottoms as his own fingers swelled with arthritis.

Those days were long days, where he would lather shaving cream on a face that had always preferred a clean shave and any nick would draw his own panic but no reaction, even as he wiped away the blood with stinging alcohol swabs. Days where he would half convince, half carry an uncooperative body into the bathroom for a bath and relief, wiping thick soap over skin pulled with scars but few wrinkles, spotted with age but not damage.

Those were long days that ended with him swaddling a frightened almost-child into bed, tucking in blankets around limbs that might protest if the thoughts could come together so quickly. The days that ended with long drafts of brandy and waking the next morning with palpitations from having forgotten to take medication through silent sobs and barrage of bloodstained memories of a lifetime that now only he knew.

Those days were coming more and more often with each one that passed.

But there were days like this, too. Days when halfway through preparing breakfast, having started the morning with the familiar eyes that held no knowledge of him and uncertain hands that had retracted, not knowing why they wrapped so tightly around him to begin with, that he would be joined by a familiar face, greeted with a kiss to his temple above where his now permanent glasses now dug small grooves above his ears. “Hello, Will.”

Days like this were full of life, of soft conversations that never ventured much past what was happening around them. The backing was gone, left behind a shell that was more than good enough for him now, would have to be enough for him. Soft questions about the dog, the weather, the food that he prepared with aching hands. Offers to look into possible helps for those same aches, bubbling laughs at now self-inflicted shaving nicks and the dog’s attempts to catch the birds enjoying the feeder he tried to keep stocked with sugar water, if only for something to look at on days not like this one. A day like this was a thing of beauty all its own.

They all ended the same. “Will you read me something?” The same question, with weathered hands that would extend with a leather-bound book between them, pages frayed from frequent travel and well-worn finger grooves from comforting use.

His words would float between them, his own eyesight vaguely cloudy but clear enough for this. They started outside, on the swing he had built for them when they came here, before the quiet days when they would curl there together until strong arms had carried him after he would fall asleep on the shoulder of a suit jacket that no longer fit quite right. But days like those were long past, and now they sat more carefully, prepared to listen as the evening faded into croaking frogs and firefly lights as night started to fall and they were forced to go inside for better light. Suit jackets and pressed trousers had given ways to soft sweaters and his worn through jacket he had stopped buttoning when his fingers had stopped curling the right way.

It was easier, he had learned, to finish their stories in the bed. To lie down side by side and let his voice fill the room around him until a soft head with thick falling white hair rested on his shoulder and he could lower him down into sleep gently and ready himself to start the next day just the same. But on days like this, he couldn’t do that.

There were days like this when the fire of their old life would catch up to him. Where the ghosts of Jack Crawford and Abigail Hobbs swirled in his brain and he couldn’t bear to end the day so quickly. He would lead them gently into the living room, sitting in his usual seat on the couch, dog sprawled in front of the fire, and he would read there. If sleep came, there was a chance that the familiarity would be gone and he would have to go to his old routine of cradling and swaddling him until he could sleep while his night was washed away in whiskey that his body wished he would stop drinking.

But if they lasted through the story on days like this, he couldn’t help but ask the questions. “What do you remember, Hannibal?”

“About what, mylimasis?” Was always the response, long hands, once capable of so much torment folded gently over slacks he had washed and rung on days that weren’t like this.

“About us.”

And on days like this, he would sit still as he was joined on the couch and a gentle hand would stroke his face, confusion evident. “You and I have been together our whole lives, dear one.”

“Do you remember our family?” And on days like this, he couldn’t stop the tears. Couldn’t stop the guilt at the pained confusion he saw reflected back at him.

“You are my family, mylimasis.” And the gentle smile would hurt his heart so badly that he would kiss the fingers stroking his beard to keep from sobbing out loud.

“Do you remember our life before this? Jack? Abigail?” There would only ever be confusion, those things too far gone to be here with them now. “Alana? Bedelia?” He would feel his own desperation mounting.

“I’m sorry.” The apology would come because he had pulled it from him like taffy candy on a spinning wheel. It was an apology for pain, for the distressed tears on his cheeks that soaked the soft hem of the sweater. On days like this, the apology was the only thing he hated.

“Do you want to hear a story about us? About the start of our life?” He would ask then, and, unable to look at the gentle, curved-lip smile that would follow, he would pull his back to his chest as much as could be done, and press his forehead to the shoulder of a soft white sweater that he himself had purchased in what was certainly now another lifetime.

And on days like this, he would weave the tapestry of their life in full color. Abigail, taken and broken, the Dragon, bold and bleeding. The decades between that tumble from the cliff and the story they were writing now, so like the other days of recent memory. He stopped when he got to the quiet days, the knowledge that things were slipping and the fact that the last time they had hunted together was certainly the last time they would ever do so. He passed those over and brought them to this moment, skipping years in a lifetime that would leave an uncountable legacy, in a bond forged by steel.

And by the end on days like this, he would be sobbing so loudly by the end that it all seemed as though even the quiet days would never drown the sound out of the echoes of the house. And then the answer would come, the response to what was a rich tapestry of fabrications that held no falsehood in their threads, and that he would never let himself be certain of.

“It’s all I ever wanted for us, Will.” It was always the same on days like this. Always an echo of a heartbeat long past, one that made him curl their fingers together over the sweater.

“It’s beautiful.” He would respond quietly, with a gentle kiss to the temple, closing his eyes and letting the rest of it faded into whatever it was going to be. Sometimes, on days like this, it ended there on the couch where he would wake the next morning to the dog licking his fingers to be let outside and a soft body cradled against him. Or it would end in their bed where unknowing eyes would look at him as he woke to begin the day. Or it would end with soft kisses and a thousand questions about things he hoped he would always be able to recall with perfect clarity and never have to remember again because the ache of them would never go away. Stories of travels and safe houses and hunts and forgiveness and intimacy and everything else that their life had tumbled into that stayed lodged where he could explain them. It was days like this that he loved. That he lived for.

It was days like this that ached so much.


End file.
